© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Introduction Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat On Empire and Sovereignty The attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 aimed at what Al-Qaeda saw as the heart of America’s global empire. The subsequent reactions in America and the rest of the world demonstrated that sov- ereignty and its ultimate expression—the ability and the will to employ overwhelming violence and to decide on life and death—have been re- configured in the last decades of the twentieth century. The “war on ter- ror” and the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated that under- neath the complex structures of power in modern, liberal societies, territorial sovereignty, and the foundational violence that gave birth to it, still remains the hard kernel of modern states—an intrinsically vio- lent “truth” of the modern nation-state that remains its raison d’être in periods of crisis. Jus ad bellum, the possibility of waging war against those one declares as enemies remains a central dimension of how a state per- forms its “stateness.” At the same time, these reactions also vindicated Hardt and Negri’s assertion that “imperial sovereignty” of the twenty- first century differs from earlier forms of imperial power (Hardt and Negri 2000, 161–204). As opposed to earlier eras, today’s empire of global network-power has no outside. The enemies, or “deviants,” within this space of moral-political-economic domination are all “within,” and are often former allies of the U.S. government. In the simplified view of the Bush administration, these constitute an “axis of evil” that must be punished and disciplined in preemptive military strikes to se- cure internal peace in the United States and among its allies. The sover- eign prerogative is to declare who is an internal enemy, and the “war on terror” is a war on internal enemies—within nation-states now policed under new stringent security acts, and within the global empire where legality and rights have been suspended for those declared “illegal combatants” and incarcerated in Afghan prisons, Guantanamo Bay, and other “spaces of exception.” The global transformations of politics, economy, and culture have been explored in various ways by theorists of globalization and inter- For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 2 • Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat national relations.1 Their obvious merits notwithstanding, these works still maintain an unbroken link between state power, sovereignty, and territory. Sovereignty resides in the state, or in institutions empowered by states, to exercise sovereign power in supra national institutions and within the nation-state defined by its territory and the control of its populations. The emphasis in this body of literature remains on sover- eignty as a formal, de jure property whose efficacy to a large extent is de- rived from being externally recognized by other states as both sover- eign and legitimate. This taking effective sovereignty for granted is questioned by Stephen Krasner (1999) in his influential work, “Sover- eignty: Organized Hypocracy.” Krasner shows how international sov- ereignty and the principles of nonintervention are being breached in numerous ways by imposition as well as agreement, but in his account, sovereignty remains inherently linked to territory and the state power of states. It seems that sovereignty cannot be imagined independently of the state. This volume questions the obviousness of the state-territory-sover- eignty link. In tune with a line of constructivist scholarship in Interna- tional Relations theory (e.g., Kratochwill 1986; Ruggie 1993; Biersteker and Weber 1996) we conceptualize the territorial state and sovereignty as social constructions. Furthermore, we suggest to shift the ground for our understanding of sovereignty from issues of territory and external recognition by states, toward issues of internal constitution of sover- eign power within states through the exercise of violence over bodies and populations. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel remarks that during “the feudal monar- chy of earlier times, the state certainly had external sovereignty, but in- ternally, neither the monarch nor the state was sovereign” (Hegel [1821] 1991, 315). This “internal sovereignty” of the modern state was only possible under “lawful and constitutional conditions,” in a unitary “Rechtsstaat” whose “ideality” would show itself as “ends and modes of operation determined by, and dependent on, the end of the whole” (316, emphasis as in original). Hegel makes it clear that this modern “ideality” of sovereignty can only be realized insofar as local and fa- milial solidarities of “civil society” are sublated to expressions of patri- otism through the state, particularly in situations of crisis (316). Even in this, the most systematic thinker of the modern state, sovereignty is not the bedrock of state power but a precarious effect—and an objective— of state formation. Building on insights from a previous volume that sought to “denatu- ralize” the postcolonial state (Hansen and Stepputat 2001), and motivated 1 Notably Sassen (1996); Ong (1999); Jackson (1999); Brace and Hoffman (1997); Held (2000), to mention but a few. For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Introduction • 3 by global events, we propose in this volume to take a fresh and ethno- graphically informed look at the meanings and forms of sovereignty in the same postcolonial zones of the world. Our aims are threefold. First, we suggest that sovereign power and the violence (or the threat thereof) that always mark it, should be studied as practices dispersed throughout, and across, societies. The unequivocal linking of sovereign power to the state is a historically contingent and peculiar outcome of the evolution of the modern state system in Europe since the West- phalian peace in 1648. The discipline of International Relations has for decades assumed states to be both normal, that is, with de facto legiti- mate control of their populations and territory, and identical, that is, with similar interests, strategies, and expected patterns of action.2 To become a normal sovereign state with normal citizens continues to be a powerful ideal, releasing considerable creative energy, and even more repressive force, precisely because its realization presupposed the dis- ciplining and subordination of other forms of authority. We suggest that sovereignty of the state is an aspiration that seeks to create itself in the face of internally fragmented, unevenly distributed and unpre- dictable configurations of political authority that exercise more or less legitimate violence in a territory. Sovereign power, whether exercised by a state, in the name of the nation, or by a local despotic power or community court, is always a tentative and unstable project whose effi- cacy and legitimacy depend on repeated performances of violence and a “will to rule.” These performances can be spectacular and public, secret and menacing, and also can appear as scientific/technical ratio- nalities of management and punishment of bodies. Although the meanings and forms of such performances of sovereignty always are historically specific, they are, however, always constructing their public authority through a capacity for visiting violence on human bodies. Second, the chapters in this volume foreground the ethnographic de- tail and the historical specificity in studies of sovereignty and its corre- late, citizenship and other forms of institutionalized practices belong- ing to a state and/or a community defined by, but not delimited by, a territory. All contributors, whether anthropologists or not, focus on the historically embedded practices and cultural meanings of sovereign power and violence, and the de facto practices of citizenship and be- longing in a wide range of contexts. The focus is unequivocally on the performance of sovereign power within nations, and on the precarious construction and maintenance of localized sovereign power through 2 For a good critique of these assumptions, see Bartelson’s more philosophical critique of realism (Bartelson 1995, 12–52). Cynthia Weber’s incisive study of sovereignty as sim- ulation produced through acts of international intervention (Weber 1995), and Biersteker and Weber’s volume on the social construction of sovereignty (1996). For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 4 • Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat exercise of actual or “spectral” violence—transmitted through rumors, tales, and reputations. The issue at stake is de facto recognition of sover- eign power by local and discerning “audiences” who often pay their dues to several authorities at the same time. Taken together, the contri- butions make it clear that although sovereign power always